Galerie Chaton

Sarel Petrus

Memento
10 August to 7 September 2024

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky."

(Vladimir Nabokov)
 
I remember finding Barn owl pellets, as a schoolboy, behind the school hall stage.  Dissecting the strange smooth hairy shapes to find rodent skulls and bones.  I remember collecting Long-tailed widow bird tail feathers on the farm where we had primary school tennis lessons.  I remember a schoolboy-with-a-book taxidermy attempt, a roadkill Barn owl.  Abandoning the project when I had to start scraping brains out of the small delicate skull with a bent wire.  I remember boiling a Spotted eagle-owl's head in a coffee tin on an open fire to clean the skull.  I remember writing down the name date and place of newly identified birds using Ian Sinclair's Field guide to the birds of Southern Africa.  I remember finding a dead Spotted thick-knee on a school friend's farm, breaking off the wings and later mounting them on plywood, spread open and salted to dry out completely.  I remember my parents pointing out nature's clues to animal's lives around me on innumerable hikes.  The intrinsic beauty of natural objects, skulls, feathers, bones, frogs and shells is the reason I've been collecting over the span of my life.  Despite my failures at preserving some of them, I still have specimens I collected in primary school.

I remember making a steel armature of a bird, in second year sculpture class, melting black refuse bags over it to form a ghostly pitted bird shell.  I remember telling the sculpture instructor I only want to make birds.  Then I didn't make more birds, found objects and ready-mades became my student-days  modus operandi.  The underlying aesthetic of found objects underlining the point of the artwork.  I remember cutting off dead bird's wings on the band saw in the university sculpture studio. I remember mounting a dead dove on plywood to dry it out and spraying it with deodorant, trying to conceal the smell.  I remember the first artwork I sold while being a student, a Laughing dove wing mounted on a stick used to stir paint of various colours.  I remember selling a student artwork containing a bird carcass and rusty nails.

I remember my first attempts at making moulds of birds.  I remember a failed mould of a cat. I remember helping another student with piglet moulds.  I remember casting rats, fish, frogs and birds in bronze at Guy du Toit's studio, an environment where experimentation was an important ingredient of every day art making.  Does there seem to be many birds in my memories?

And I remember a deserted suburban street, watching an Olive thrush fly into the windscreen of the car I am driving. Witnessing the little bird's trajectory change abruptly.  From a fast straight decisive line to a gentle slow arc, terminating on a lawn next to the road.  Holding the tiny still body in my hand I could wonder at the beauty from up-close.  I cast that small realization in bronze, cremating the feathers and bones in the labour intensive casting ritual. 

I have my memories and they are shaping my future.  We deliberate, we remember, we decide, we choose a path and it can quickly change through seemingly random outside events. Memory is elusive, infused by emotion. The strange unknown existence of a little bird becomes a permanent bronze artwork.  A monument to a forgotten fragile beauty.  It's stories untold.  It's value unquestioned, unquestionable.  It's reflected existence unbound.  I believe our memories change as our knowledge and understanding expands.  The bird's ultimate fate changed by my human presence; my memories forever impacted by the bird's final flight. I see the little bird continuing its flitting arc, oblivious of the accidental instant our paths might have crossed.